Get it Right

This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregations of Unfinished Community and Ashiya Christian Church on Sunday, November 2, 2025, drawing from Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4

So we’re right here, at the start of the sermon, and already I know that some of you - perhaps even most of you - are wondering just what crazy, borderline TMI, personal anecdote or crazy story I’m going to throw at you to contextualize today’s Bible verse. 

And alright….fair. I do have quite a number of crazy stories in my personal “back catalogue,” as it were, and I’ve never been especially shy about whipping them out if they serve even the slightest hint of a purpose. 

Heck, just this past week I preached to a room full of middle and high school students and managed to relate some of the opening verses of 1 Peter to the time where I had to spend time with the police because an elementary school bully tried to push me into traffic. So…yeah. I get the expectation. Even I have to admit…it makes sense. 

But today…I’m actually not going to do that. Not because I don’t have one, of course - I have many, as always - but because I don’t think we need one. 

You see, for all of his “Old Testament prophet raging at kings for some very-Old Testament BS”-ness, Habakkuk here is really all of us. 

Seriously though, tell me that line “LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save?” Isn’t something each and every one of has prayed, or perhaps screamed in God’s general direction, at least three times this week!

We have all of us, at various points in our lives, been visited with harm by another, whether that’s personal harm from a bully, or even from someone close to us, or institutional harm, such as the US government’s ongoing campaign of effectively genocide against immigrants, the LGBTQIA+ community, and many more. And whenever that happens, our natural instinct is to cry out for retribution.

We want somebody, anybody, to make sure that justice is done. 

And, sadly, because our human hearts don’t come with that built-in ability to understand justice the way God does - as a function of love, reparative and reconciliatory rather than recklessly retributive   - when we cry out for that justice what we’re usually calling out is for somebody to pay.

We want recompense. We want the person who rose up on the backs of our pain and suffering to be dragged back down again, we want them to suffer as we have suffered, hurt as we have hurt; we to see our pain revisited upon them, plus a little extra for the trouble while we’re at it. 

And we get absolutely indignant with God when we cry out for God’s help, expecting God to send an army of angels, flaming swords in hands, to lay waste our enemies, only to receive the gentle whisper of the Spirit in our hearts counseling compassion, patience, and love. 

We get pissed off, don’t we? After all, where does God get off making us watch while evil triumphs at the expense of the good? Where does God get off burying us in strife and contention, trouble and wrongdoing, while those who bring us harm are out there, living their best lives with wanton glee, not a care in the world about the rivers of tears left in their wake? The law becomes slack, justice never prevails, the wicked surround the righteous, and judgments come out perverted. 

Just what the hell are does God expect us to do here?

Regardless of what we expect, God’s response to this is always the same; to remind us that God’s justice isn’t retributive at all. It’s compassionate.

And compassion takes time.

Those who choose evil, harmful, and selfish ways for themselves do not need you, or I, or even God to heap destruction upon them as punishment; they are the architects of their own destruction. 

Selfishness, hatred, cruelty; all these things come from fear. Fear leads to desperation, and desperation is simply not sustainable in the long run. 

When someone builds their lifestyle on lies and deceptions, on hatred and cruelty for their own personal gain, what they’re really doing is burning their connections with other people as fuel to escape from the fear that drives them. After all, it is axiomatic that one cannot lie to people forever; the truth will always out eventually. 

The power of one who lies, who oppresses, who cheats and who steals is contradictory; it depends solely on the support and belief of others to sustain itself, but it burns that same support up in order to survive. 

Those who hate, hate because they selfishly hold themselves superior to others, afraid that another might be in some way better than they, more worthy than they. 

Those who oppress, oppress because they selfishly believe that they must take from others in order to survive themselves, afraid that if another prospers then they will suffer. 

Those who lie, and cheat, and steal do so because their fear tells them that honesty, fidelity, integrity, compassion, and love are too risky, too difficult, too mendokusai when one could simply take what one wants instead and not have to worry about the kind of sharing, compromise, and patience necessary for everyone to prosper together. 

Eventually, as my father once told me, you run out of people to lie to. And then, much like the boy who cried wolf, you find yourself out in the cold, all alone as the sun begins to set, hearing the hungry growls growing just beyond the treeline. 

Of course, once we realize that, it becomes really easy to just sit back and take it easy; to “let go and let God,” as the evangelicals like to say. Once we know that evil cannot endure, once we know that evil people always get what’s coming to them in the end, we can relax, right? After all, we are good people, so we have nothing to worry about!

But I want to invite you to pay very close attention just now, to what God says through the prophet Habakkuk here, because it may be a bit subtle, but I truly believe there is a powerful truth right here. 

"Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faithfulness."

Pride is the heart’s knee-jerk defensive reaction to fear; it is what our hearts do when we cannot reckon with the fear that has come upon us. When we feel suffocated, trapped between a reality where the hard work of care and compassion for others feels like it’s stagnating our lives and a potential future where all our dreams could come true if we would just…give in to the temptation a bit, pride jumps in to tell us we deserve it. 

Pride tells us that we are good enough to take what we want, that we deserve what we want, and that anyone who would get in between us and our happiness with their foolish notions of love, and compassion, and care aren’t other people to whom we have a duty to love in Christ aren’t people really;

They’re obstacles. 

Of course, when you put it like that, it seems easy enough to avoid, right? 

But it doesn’t start out that way.

Pride tempts us gradually. It nudges us into sneaking a few cents from the till because we work so very hard, or tells us that one little kiss isn’t really cheating if it makes us happier when we come home at the end of the night, or it tells us that it’s ok to toss vulnerable communities under the bus now because we can try to help them later when we get elected. 

Pride doesn’t scream at us. It whispers to us, gently bending our spirits out of alignment one millimeter at a time until we can’t even see how crooked our souls have become. 

But the righteous live by their faithfulness.

I love the difference in phrasing here, by the way. The text describes the proud in the passive voice, saying “their spirit is not right within them,” because they are still people too; just like the rest of us, formed in the image of God the creator, and totally capable of exercising just as much love, care, and compassion as you or I. 

They just listened to the temptations of pride, offering them a way out of their fear one nudge at a time. 

But the righteous on the other hand, are described with an active verb: they live by their faithfulness. They choose to act against their wants and needs in the name of love and compassion for others. They choose to defy their fear and face it, building connection through the patient, difficult work of compromise and care. They still hear the beckoning siren-song of pride whispering temptation as panacea to their fears, promising all the kingdoms of the world and their glory if you but listen to me, but they choose to defy it, to send it away.

Evil is not inherent. There are no “evil” people, because this is something to which we are all vulnerable; a surrender to the temptations of the more crooked, selfish parts of our inner nature, something present within each and every one of us. From the king on high to the lowliest peasant, from Trump in his soon-to-be gold-plated ballroom to the homeless man living in the shadow of one of Trump's many failed casinos, we all have the potential to given in to selfishness, pride, and evil. Every one of us, in our darkest and most fearful moments, has the potential to give in to the temptations of pride.

But righteousness is a choice.

And it’s not a choice we make just once. 

Righteousness is a choice we make every day to acknowledge our own suffering, to look full in the face of our own fears, and choose to call out for compassion rather than violence. Righteousness is a choice we make every day to bear the hurt others might heap upon us with grace, a choice not to avenge ourselves upon those who hurt us, not to heap heap those coals right back on their heads and more on top, a choice not to demand that those who took everything from us lose everything in turn. 

Righteousness is a choice we make every day to pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding, as it says in Romans 14.

Righteousness is cultivated meticulously, with a million daily choices to face our fears and try to build God’s kingdom here on earth, as it is in heaven.

Evil takes root and thrives when we give into our fears, and allow our pride to make us into our own God, building our own kingdom to protect us from the very people we were given to love in the first place.  

Righteousness is the unending journey of trying, day in and day out, to damn the temptations and get it right. To look to the other not with anger or a heart for vengeance, but with compassion. To look beyond the hurts we receive to the broken spirit within the other. To yield not to the temptations of pride but to the promises of compassion, the promises of divine love which does not bend our spirit within us, but creates in us a clean heart, and renews a right spirit within us.

With every choice we make. Every temptation we refuse.

Every day.

Amen